Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
shane_williss is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
n09_13_2003 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	93.2
woman_s_childbearing_years is a non-disease physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
lyndon_kansas is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
alex_escobar is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
products is a generalization of wheat_flour	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
ryan_church is an athlete who led new_york_mets	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
magic participated in the event series	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
the sports team chicago_bulls was the winner of weeks	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
bartlesville is a city located in the state or province oklahoma	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0